Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Barbara Lea was born Barbara Ann LeCocq on April 10, 1929 in Detroit, Michigan. A musical family, her musical heritage is traceable to a great uncle, Alexandre Charles LeCocq, an important nineteenth-century composer of French light opera. Her father changed their surname to Leacock and she shortened it to Lea when she began working professionally.
Boston was a hotbed of jazz in the late 1940s and early 1950s, allowing Lea to sing with major instrumentalists including as Marian McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Frankie Newton, Johnny Windhurst and George Wein. She worked with small dance bands there before majoring in music theory at Wellesley College on scholarship. She also sang in the college choir, worked on the campus radio station and newspaper, and arranged for and conducted the Madrigal Group and brass choir concerts.
Barbara’s professional career started upon graduation with her early recordings for Riverside and Prestige. They were met with immediate critical acclaim that led to her winning the DownBeat International Critics’ Poll as the Best New Singer of 1956. She appeared in small clubs in New York and throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada, as well as on radio and TV.
With the near-demise of classic pop in the early 60s, Lea turned to the legitimate theatre, performing an impressive list of leading and feature roles in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. Moving to the West Coast received her M.A. in drama at Cal State Northridge and then returned to New York and taught speech at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and acting at Hofstra University.
By the 1970s, with the resurgence of interest in show tunes and popular standards, Lea performed on NPR’s “American Popular Song with Alec Wilder & Friends”, appeared in two shows featuring the songs of Willard Robison and Lee Wiley, and received lengthy features in the New Yorker magazine. With her singing career was renewed she would consistently play the JVC, Kool and Newport Jazz Festivals as well as cabarets and concerts.
Jazz singer Barbara Lea, who also sang Dixieland, swing and cabaret, passed away on December 26, 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Art Van Damme was born on April 9, 1920 in Norway, Michigan. He began playing the accordion at age nine and started classical study when his family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1934. By 1941 he joined Ben Bernie’s band as an accordionist and adapted Benny Goodman’s music to the instrument.
From 1945 to 1960 Art worked for NBC, performing on The Dinah Shore Show, Tonight, The Dave Garroway Show and other radio and TV shows with Garroway. He recorded 130 episodes of the 15-minute The Art Van Damme Show for NBC Radio.
Van Damme toured Europe and was popular with jazz audiences in Japan, regularly winning the domestic Down Beat Reader’s Poll for his instrument. Over the course of his career he recorded and released four-dozen albums for Capitol, Columbia, Harmony, BASF, Pausa, Finlandia, MPS record labels.
Retiring to Roseville, California, he continued to perform almost to the end of his life. Ill with pneumonia for several weeks, accordionist Art Van Damme passed away on February 15, 2010 at the age of 89.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eiji Kitamura 北村 英治 was born on April 8, 1929 in Tokyo, Japan. Devoting himself to clarinet, he was playing while still an undergrad at Keio University at in Tokyo. He made his debut at the age of 22.
Kitamura built a following in his country performing regularly on his television program. He first came to prominence in the United States at the 20th Anniversary Jam Session of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1977. His following in Japan was built previous to this on his regular television program.
An interpreter of traditional jazz, the clarinetist prefers this genre over modern jazz. Much of his influence in his playing came from the swing of Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. He has recorded some two-dozen albums or more albums including a series of albums with Teddy Wilson as well as for CBS Sony, Concord and various Japanese labels over the course of his career.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Robert Berg was born on April 7, 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. He started his musical education at the age of six when he began studying classical piano. He began playing the saxophone at the age of thirteen and went on to graduate from Juilliard. He was influenced heavily by the late 1964–67 period of John Coltrane’s music.
A student from the hard bop school, Bob played from 1973 to 1976 with Horace Silver and then from 1977 to 1983 with Cedar Walton. Berg became more widely known through his short period in the Miles Davis band but left the band in 1987 after recording only one album, You’re Under Arrest.
After leaving Davis’s band, Berg released a series of solo albums and performed and recorded frequently in a group co-led with guitarist Mike Stern. On these albums he played a more accessible style of music, mixing funk, jazz and even country music with many other diverse compositional elements to produce albums that were always musical. He often played at the 7th Avenue South NYC club.
He worked with Chick Corea, Steve Gadd and Eddie Gomez in a quartet. Bob’s tenor saxophone sound was a synthesis of rhythm and blues players such as Junior Walker and Arnett Cobb with the lyricism, intellectual freedom and soul of Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson and Coltrane. Over the course of his short career he recorded a dozen albums as a leader and performed sideman duties on another 30 albums with Randy Brecker, Tom Coster, Kenny Drew, Moncef Genoud, Billy Higgins, Dizzy Gillespie, Sam Jones and Wolfgang Muthspiel.
Saxophonist Bob Berg, who was known for his extremely expressive playing and tone, passed away on December 5, 2002 as a result of a traffic accident. His car was struck by a cement truck that slid on the ice in East Hampton, New York while driving near his home with his wife Arja.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Arthur S. Taylor, Jr. was born in New York City on April 6, 1929 and as a teenager he joined a local Harlem band that featured Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean and Kenny Drew. By the late Forties and into the Fifties he was playing in the bands of Howard McGee, Coleman Hawkins, Buddy DeFranco, Bud Powell, George Wallington, Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce and Donald Byrd.
After leaving Byrd he formed his own group, Taylor’s Wailers but between 1957 and 1963 he toured with Byrd, recorded with Miles Davis and John Coltrane, performed with Thelonious Monk and was a member of the original Kenny Dorham Quartet of 1957.
In 1963 he moved to Europe, where he lived mainly in France and Belgium for 20 years, playing with local groups and jazz musicians Johnny Griffin, John Bodwin, and Woody Shaw while he was in Paris. He returned to the States to help his ailing mother and continued freelancing. In 1993 Art organized a second band called Taylor’s Wailers.
He recorded five albums as a leader and 116 albums as a sideman with some of the most influential jazz musicians of the day – Gene Ammons, Dorothy Ashby, Benny Bailey, Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, Sonny Clark, James Clay, Jimmy Cleveland, Arnett Cobb, Pepper Adams, Walter Davis Jr., Red Garland, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Continuum, Matthew Gee, Benny Golson, Dexter Gordon, Slide Hampton, Bennie Green, Tiny Grimes, Elmo Hope, Frank Foster, Erne Henry, Milt Jackson, Thad Jones, Clifford Jordan, Duke Jordan, Ken McIntrye, Lee Morgan, Oliver Nelson, Cecil Payne, Horace Silver, Dizzy Reece, Jimmy Smith, Mal Waldron, Julian Priester, Charlie Rouse, Kai Winding, J.J. Johnson, Toots Thielemans, Randy Weston, Sonny Stitt, Jack McDuff, Stanley Turrentine, and the list goes on and on.
Art Taylor helped define the sound of modern jazz drumming and authored Notes and Tones, a book based on his interviews with other musicians. He passed away in Manhattan’s Beth Israel Hospital on February 6, 1995.
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